How the SF Chronicle failed San Francisco

The Chronicle's Heather Knight in the column I wrote about the other day:

Rain in the Bay Area. Snow in the mountains. News of a potentially promising coronavirus vaccine. An incoming president who believes in science, facts and grammar. It feels like hope has arrived in San Francisco — at long last.

One thing San Francisco can't hope for: that the city's most important newspaper will ever oppose a major City Hall project. 

I've culled some examples about how poorly over the years the Chronicle has served the people of San Francisco.

C.W. Nevius did some good early work on the homeless issue, but that was an important City Hall policy/project under Mayor Newsom. 

Alas, when he wrote about other city issues, he began looking like a shill for City Hall. See this, this, this, and this.

John King has done his best over the years to turn San Francisco into Highriseville: see this and this. 

See also this on his peculiar affection for and obsession with the city's Octavia Blvd. planning and traffic fiasco.

The Chronicle joined the city's anti-car movement early by endorsing Critical Mass on the front page in 2007.

It followed that up with misleading editorials on CEQA to support the anti-car bike movement: See Flab-gab and misinformation, Dumb Chronicle CEQA editorial, and Chronicle's zombie CEQA editorial.

For years the Chronicle's news stories either distorted or ignored polls showing that city voters overwhelmingly oppose congestion pricing, an anti-car policy that the SFCTA and the Bicycle Coalition have pushed for years, since it would punish people for driving those wicked motor vehicles and provide money to support the city's bloated bureaucracy.

Heather Knight in effect continues that coverage bias by denigrating CEQA, the most important environmental law in the state, implying that somehow it's obstructing environmental progress, especially when it should be applied to the city's anti-car transportation projects during the current bogus emergency.

Overcoming her boredom with covering local issues (see this and this), Knight did an important story in 2015 on traffic accidents in the city. Since then she's reverted to her default position supporting City Hall.

Perhaps the worst example of journalistic malpractice is how the Chronicle ignored that UC study on how the city was failing to count cycling accidents in San Francisco, which shocked even an old cynic like me.

You would think that since the Chronicle supported the Bicycle Plan and, presumably, safety for city cyclists it would have covered that story. The NY Times thought cycling safety in San Francisco was newsworthy, but not the Chronicle---or the Examiner, the SF Bay Guardian, and the SF Weekly.

Why? My suspicion: the story---and the study---dramatically undermined City Hall's important pro-bike, anti-car policies by showing that cycling was a lot more dangerous than the Bicycle Coalition and City Hall had been telling us for years.

You wonder how that worked in the Chronicle. It must have been an editorial decision, since no reporter or columnist---or even a letter to the editor---has ever mentioned the study.

The Chronicle does have a recent history of editorial bullying: see Going to the women's march? You're fired!, The Chronicle's high-minded rhetoric.